Alex Staines

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Alex Staines with Guests is a performance art collaboration between poet Alex Staines and guest composers, musicians and artists. Staines’ most recent album, Time of the Archons, was released in July 2017, and has been described as “transgressive/dystopian themed poetry with piano and electronics.” Composer Brad Jenkins sees the work as suggestive of landscape: “‘Motes’ is the surface of Mars – dense, depopulated. Other tracks feel located in a subterranean vault.”

Staines’ previous album, Seclusion Data, is also a volume of poetry, following on from Warning: Poems and The Slow Road to Gore. Guests on Seclusion Data include Steve Wolf, Guy MacGibbon, Brad Jenkins, Colin Kaldenbach and Aaron Frater.

Staines developed his ‘energetic’ performance style in the eighties, based on his love for all things punk. His first published volume, a double act with fellow poet Mike Eager, was described by Tony Beyer in the Evening Post as “aspiring to and achieving some almost ecstatic moments of bad taste”.

Eager and Staines met in 1988 at the founding of the group Poetrycorp, a sort of attack-dog perfomance poetry troupe. Other Poetrycorp personnel included Apirana Taylor, the late Andrew Kovacevich, the late Simon Williamson, Fa’afetai Ta’ase, Nikolien Van Wijk and Paul Dagarin. Poetrycorp toured widely, and attained what these days would be called a “cult following”.

Staines’ video short, The Voice of Foxton, screened at Antimatter Underground Film Festival in Canada in 2002, as well as film festivals locally.